you've seen my water report. i have almost no calcium and a higher PH than many. would you expect that that doesn't matter, and that the DME and yeast nutrient lowers my Ph and adds enough for a healthy starter?

Yeah, that would be my guess. You won't know til you try, though. Truthfully, if I was in your position and worried about it, I'd go the distilled water route. When extract is made, the grain is mashed with the appropriate minerals for the mash. They're still there in the extract and extract brewers are often encouraged to use distilled water for just that reason. I think you may be overthinking things based on the slow starter you just had. I appreciate your desire to get the best performance possible, but by my pragmatic thinking I'd start with the easiest thing you can do, evaluate that, and work from there.

The pH of your water doesn't matter - it's the pH of your prepared starter that matters. Seems to me the path of least resistance is to test the pH of your starter to see if this is a problem at all. It's not clear that you did that (though if you did, just ignore me).

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My water is similar to yours, with over 100 ppm Na, and very high alkalinity as well. There are hardly any other minerals present. My municipality clearly softens the water. For starters, I just use straight tap water, DME, and some nutrient. No problems doing this whatsoever. Don't overthink it.

For brewing, I dilute with distilled water, about 50/50. Then add gypsum and CaCl to achieve desired mineral levels. Add phosphoric acid to hit my pH.

right -when i refer to PH being high, i mean the ph of my wort. when you start with high ph and high alkalinity in water, the dme or mash does very little to bring into desired PH range.

i used my well water this morning, added calcium and magnesium and lactic acid and yeast nutrient. PH of wort settled in at about 5.4. this starter responded much better than my others without water adjustments.

I've been thinking about going no-boil for my starters, but there's always that nagging voice in the back of my head saying that you need to boil/sanitize everything that touches your beer. I'm assuming you've never had a contamination issue with your no boil starters?

I've been thinking about going no-boil for my starters, but there's always that nagging voice in the back of my head saying that you need to boil/sanitize everything that touches your beer. I'm assuming you've never had a contamination issue with your no boil starters?

I do a very short boil--10 minutes, if that. I figure that I'm way above pasteurization temperature for at least 30 minutes.

I've been thinking about going no-boil for my starters, but there's always that nagging voice in the back of my head saying that you need to boil/sanitize everything that touches your beer. I'm assuming you've never had a contamination issue with your no boil starters?

My reasoning: distilled water should already be safe from contamination...malta goya is already safe from contamination....when was the last time you had a contaminated soft drink beverage from either a bottle or a can?...malta goya is a barley malted beverage that comes in a bottle...As long as the flask is sanitized when you put the ingredients in there should be no worry of contamination and I have never had any...Same goes for the DME and the distilled water... when was the last time you had contaminated DME? cheers!!